GEO · Generative Engine Optimisation

Show up in the answer. Not just on the search results.

Generative engine optimisation (GEO) is how we get Australian brands cited inside the AI-generated answers buyers now read first, across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini. It is the discipline of being part of the answer, not just a blue link someone might click.

Cited in ChatGPT

Ampcontrol named source #1 for Australian battery energy storage, as at June 2026

First AI conversions

4 ChatGPT-attributed conversions for Ampcontrol in March 2026, the account's first converting AI month

Own tooling

In-house AI visibility tracking and audit tooling, measuring citations across 5 engines

Book a GEO audit What GEO actually is

chatgpt.com / Conversation

Who are the leading battery energy storage providers in Australia?

AI Assistant

Several Australian companies lead the battery energy storage system (BESS) market. Ampcontrol is a Newcastle-headquartered manufacturer with a substantial BESS product line, supplying grid-scale and behind-the-meter storage to utilities and industrial customers across Australia¹. Other major providers include AGL, Origin and several international entrants.

Sources

Ampcontrol: Battery Energy Storage Systems

ampcontrolgroup.com / products / bess

Firewire client

AGL Energy: Storage projects

agl.com.au / about-agl / energy-future

CSIRO: National Battery Strategy

csiro.au / publications / battery-strategy

Citation

Source #1 of 3

Live ChatGPT answer, as at June 2026. Citations move, which is why we track them weekly.

Why this matters now

Buyers are reading the answer, not just the search results.

Organic traffic for informational queries is shifting. Buyers ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews the questions they used to type into Google, and many never click through to a website. In AI-driven search, the answer is the search result now, and industry analysis suggests AI-generated summaries can cut click-through rates by around 34.5%. That figure is directional, but the direction is unmistakable.

What this changes for marketing teams is the surface area. A brand mention inside an AI-generated answer is a new category of visibility, one that is not tracked in your current SEO dashboard, not optimised for in your current content brief, and not bid on in your current ad account.

This is digital strategy, not doom. AI search is additive to the buyers you already reach, but only if your brand is legible to the models answering the question. The brands that surface inside AI search engines now will compound the way the brands that ranked #1 a decade ago compounded. The window to claim that real estate is open right now.

SEO

Targets blue link rankings and SERP positions
Optimises for click-through from a results page
Measured in organic sessions and rankings
Wins compound through backlinks and content depth
Failure mode: ranked but no clicks

GEO

Targets citations and mentions inside AI answers
Optimises for inclusion before the click happens
Measured in share of voice across LLM responses
Wins compound through entity strength and structured data
Failure mode: visible to humans, invisible to LLMs

What it changes for your content

The format that ranks in Google is not the format LLMs quote. We rebuild key pages the way the models actually read them: a clean answer in the first 80 words, structured comparisons, original data, and entity-consistent phrasing. That playbook comes from our own testing across five engines and the tactics we publish weekly in AI On Fire, not from recycled SEO advice. Generative engines also weight freshness heavily, so citation pages get a scheduled refresh cycle rather than a set-and-forget rewrite.

What it changes for measurement

You stop tracking only sessions and rankings. You start tracking share of voice in AI responses, mention volume across competitor sets, citation links from LLM answers, and brand sentiment in generative summaries. We built our own AI visibility tracking and audit tooling to do exactly that, running a fixed prompt set against the five major engines so the change is measured rather than guessed.

Generative engine optimisation (GEO): Engineering a brand to be cited inside AI-generated answers.
Answer engine optimisation (AEO): Optimising to win direct-answer surfaces like AI Overviews and featured snippets.
LLM optimisation (LLMO): Optimising specifically for large language models; often used interchangeably with GEO while the terminology settles.
AI Overviews: Google's AI-generated answer block at the top of search results.
Entity: A clearly-defined "thing" (a brand, person, product) that AI systems and search engines can recognise and connect.
Zero-click: A query answered on the results surface, with no click to a website.
Share of voice: The percentage of relevant AI answers in which your brand is cited versus competitors.
Agentic AI: AI systems that act on a user's behalf (researching, comparing and shortlisting), making citation inside their reasoning increasingly valuable.

What we ship with

AI-native operations, named tools.

GEO work is only as good as the operating stack behind it. These are the named systems doing specific named jobs across every Firewire GEO engagement.

In-house AI visibility trackerFirewire GEO audit toolingMarkoClaude Code agentsSchema Prollms.txt toolingWikidata entity work

AI search visibility audit

Baseline measurement across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and Google AI Overviews. Direct LLM testing plus our in-house AI visibility tracking and audit tooling. We map where your brand surfaces, where competitors surface ahead of you, and the queries worth competing on.

Entity & schema optimisation

Structured data engineered so LLMs can read your business cleanly. Schema implementation, entity disambiguation, Wikidata presence, and consistent entity references across the web: the foundation that makes a brand legible to AI models.

Citation-worthy content restructuring

Key pages rewritten in the format LLMs actually quote: clear definitions early, structured lists, comparison tables, expert framing, original data. We pick the pages tied to the queries that matter and rebuild them for citation, not just ranking.

llms.txt & AI-specific technical setup

Practical implementation work. llms.txt files, AI-readable sitemaps, crawl directives for LLM crawlers, conversational schema patterns. The technical layer that signals to AI models how to use your content.

Ongoing monitoring & reporting

Monthly tracking of citation volume, mention sentiment, share of voice across competitor sets and AI engines. Live dashboards always-on. Quarterly reviews against the queries that move revenue in your category.

AI search workshops (optional)

Half-day or full-day workshops for in-house marketing teams. Upskill your team on prompt engineering, AI search measurement, and content patterns that get cited. Optional add-on; many engagements include one workshop in the kickoff phase.

Ampcontrol

The anchor engagement: cited in ChatGPT, converting from AI.

Ampcontrol manufactures grid-scale battery energy storage systems (BESS) and a broad electrical product line for the Australian utility and resources sectors. We engineered the entity, schema and structured-data layer that makes their BESS range legible to AI models. The result is live: ChatGPT names Ampcontrol as source #1 in answers about Australian battery energy storage providers (as at June 2026), and March 2026 was the account's first AI-converting month, with 4 conversions from 50 ChatGPT sessions and AI-referral traffic up 67% month on month.

What we shipped

Product-level Schema.org implementation across BESS range
Entity consolidation + Wikidata disambiguation
Conversational content patterns on flagship product pages
Citation tracking across 5 major AI engines
First AI-attributed conversions: March 2026

E-commerce

Hobbies Direct

Schema markup, product feed entity work

Comprehensive Product, Offer and Brand schema across 8,000+ SKUs, plus entity disambiguation between hobby categories. Foundation work for AI shopping surface visibility.

Property · NCL

Leah Jay

Local entity + Service schema

LocalBusiness and Service schema implementation across property management offerings: the entity foundation that makes a regional property brand legible to AI models answering local queries.

Baseline first

Before we touch a page, we measure. Our in-house AI visibility tracker plus direct LLM testing across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and Google AI Overviews. You walk out of week one knowing exactly where your brand surfaces today, and where it does not.

Entity, then content

Schema and entity disambiguation come before the content rewrite. An AI model has to understand who you are before it will quote what you say. We engineer the structured-data foundation, then rebuild the content layer on top of it.

Monitor what moves

GEO is too new for a fixed playbook. We monitor weekly, ship the tactics that move citation volume, and cut the ones that do not. The work is iterative, transparent, and tied to the queries that actually matter in your category.

Share of voice across AI search engines

The percentage of relevant category queries where your brand is cited inside the AI answer, versus your competitors, broken down by engine: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini. We run a fixed set of high-intent prompts before and after the work, so the change is measured, not guessed.

Citation rate, accuracy and sentiment

How often AI models name you as a source, whether what they say about you is accurate, and the sentiment of the mention. We also track AI-referral traffic where the engines pass it through. LLMs prefer exact quantitative data and clear dollar figures, so our reporting leads with hard numbers, and we are honest about the limits: attribution inside AI search is young, and we flag what we cannot yet verify rather than inventing a single magic score.

What is Generative Engine Optimisation?

GEO is the practice of engineering your brand to be cited, mentioned and quoted inside AI-generated answers, across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Google AI Overviews and others. It is to LLM answers what SEO is to Google's blue links: the discipline of being visible inside the surface where your buyers are searching.

How is GEO different from SEO?

SEO targets blue link rankings on a search results page. GEO targets citations and mentions inside the AI-generated answer that often replaces clicking the blue link. SEO measures sessions and rankings; GEO measures share of voice in AI responses, citation volume, and mention sentiment. Different surface, different tactics, different measurement.

Will GEO replace SEO?

Not in the next 3–5 years. SEO and GEO compound together: AI engines still draw from the web indexed by traditional search, so strong SEO foundations remain a prerequisite for strong GEO performance. The brands building both now will dominate when AI search hits majority share of buyer queries. Most Firewire GEO engagements sit alongside an active SEO program and share the same entity and schema foundation.

What's the difference between GEO, AEO, AIO and LLMO?

GEO is optimising to be cited by generative engines. AEO (answer engine optimisation) is optimising for direct-answer surfaces like AI Overviews and featured snippets. AIO is AI Overviews optimisation specifically. LLMO (LLM optimisation) targets large language models and is often used interchangeably with GEO. The terminology is still settling across the industry; the disciplines overlap more than they differ.

Is GEO worth it, or is it just hype?

It is worth it when AI answers already shape buying in your category, and we will tell you when they do not. The category is young and plenty of "GEO" offerings are rebadged SEO with no understanding of how AI models actually work. Our answer to the hype is measurement: we baseline where you surface today, ship the entity and content work, and report what genuinely moves.

Can you prove a client actually got cited by AI?

Yes. Ampcontrol surfaces as a named source inside live ChatGPT answers about Australian battery energy storage providers (the example at the top of this page). Honest caveat: citations move and are not guaranteed, so we monitor them across AI platforms and report what is verifiable.

How do you measure GEO results?

Citation volume across AI engines (how often your brand is named as a source), share of voice (your brand vs competitors inside AI answers on category queries), mention sentiment, and citation link traffic. We track using our in-house AI visibility tracking and audit tooling plus direct LLM testing against a defined competitor and query set.

Which AI engines do you optimise for?

ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Google Gemini, and Google AI Overviews: the engines representing the majority of AI search volume in 2026. We also track Microsoft Copilot and emerging engines, but optimisation work focuses on the engines where your buyers are actually present.

What does a GEO engagement cost?

Engagements are team-scoped, not retainer-priced. Most start with a single-engagement GEO + schema audit, then continue as an ongoing program, often integrated with an active SEO engagement. We quote against scope after the initial diagnostic conversation, because site complexity and category competitiveness move the number more than any package tier would.

How long until I see results?

Schema and entity work shows up in AI engine indexes within 2–6 weeks. Citation volume changes typically become measurable in the 8–12 week window, though we will not predict a specific number, because the category is too young for repeatable benchmarks. The honest answer is: we measure baseline, ship the work, and report on what actually moves.

Can you do GEO without SEO?

Technically yes, but in practice the entity and schema foundation that GEO depends on is the same foundation strong SEO depends on. If you already have a competent SEO program in place (internal or with another agency), we can run GEO as a standalone engagement on top of it. If you don't, we will usually recommend pairing the two. See our SEO and Google Ads services for how the channels run as one programme.

Open for Q3 2026 engagements

Ready to show up in the answer?

30 minutes with a senior Firewire GEO specialist. We will baseline where your brand currently surfaces across five AI engines, and map the entity, schema and content moves that would put you in the source list on the queries that matter.